a trail for the devil to erase
by Lucky Dice Kirby
Summary: ‹josh•metis›‹happy birthday waffies&Jay!›There are a lot of things Metis likes about summer, really.


**one**  
There are a lot of things Metis likes about summer, really. The most obvious being that, hello, _it's summer_. Read: there is no school, fuck yes. That's pretty damn awesome in and of itself, you know? And really, there's a certain novelty to not being obligated to stay up until one in the morning doing homework. Especially when you can stay up until three in the morning playing videogames instead. 'Can' being a bit of a subjective term, seeing as Metis's mom has begun to take issue with that sort of thing. Apparently she enjoys silly things like sleeping through the night (without being woken up by the sounds of simulated violence and destruction). Weird, huh?

**two**  
Metis likes IHOP, where he goes for breakfast sometimes with Jay and Sarah and Odette and Erik and Samuel, once he wakes up at around one o'clock (In the afternoon. Well, usually. Around-the-clock service is a wonderful thing). He'd tried to get Charles to come with them one time, but he had just muttered something about a waitress spilling orange juice on his brand copy of _The Graveyard Book_ the day it came out, and declined. Metis didn't see what the big deal was, since Charles had probably reduced the waitress to tears in revenge anyway. Even without Charles, watching Samuel try to find a place to lay his head down when there are pancakes in front of him is really quite amusing, especially when there are four other people to laugh about it with. Ordering frowny face pancakes, as opposed to their smiley face counterparts, just makes everything better.

**three**  
Metis likes the movies, and all the best movies come out in the summer. He likes unnecessary but really really cool looking explosions, and greasy overpriced popcorn that he makes Josh buy for him, and the taste of the popcorn on Josh's lips when the flimsy plot of whatever movie they're seeing gets too tedious to pay attention to anymore. It's a good thing they always sit in the back, or they might have gotten themselves kicked out by now.

**four**  
Metis likes the local pool, because Josh is a lifeguard there, meaning he gets to taunt him about having to work the most boring job on the face of the planet all he wants. It's even better when he's sitting in the water and eating ice cream, cool as you please, while Josh is probably only a couple degrees away from heatstroke. Sometimes he drags Charles along, because Charles is the ultimate master of taunting, but most of the time it's just him and Josh.

**five**  
Metis likes getting to play video games all day long, even if his mom says his brain is going to turn to mush and leak out of his ears. Shooting things is a wonderful form of stress relief, regardless of whether or not he has any stress to relieve in the first place. Sometimes he goes over to Charles's house to play Halo 3, though it can be hard to pry Charles away from his annual re-reading of anything and everything by Neil Gaiman. Metis once told him that someday the bindings of his books are just going to give and and disintegrate, and was rewarded with absolutely zero response, other than Charles turning a page. Other times he goes to Josh's, and kicks his ass all to hell at Guitar Hero and Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Once, Charles and Josh and Jay and all of Jay's friends ended up at Jay's house for no particular reason, and everybody played Kingdom Hearts by keeping up a constant fight over the PS2 controller. Anyone who wasn't playing and wasn't in the vicinity of the controller made witty(-ish) commentary on just about everything to do with the game, from the giant key that could apparently kill things and the fact that Sora's shoes could feed a small third world country for a year. Jay's sister couldn't stop laughing at how stupid they all looked.

**six**  
Metis likes sitting on rooftops and doing absolutely nothing for long stretches of time, and honestly, he couldn't tell you why.

**seven**  
Metis likes sitting in his room with the lights off and watching marathons of the same TV show for as long as he can stay awake. One time when Josh was sleeping over, he rented the fifth season of 24, and they spent eighteen hours watching the whole thing straight through. Josh kept count of every person who died, and Metis wrote down every plot hole or general break from reality as they watched. After a while, neither of them could keep track anymore, and it degraded into random yelling at the TV and All State commercial imitations. On the whole, they had a hell of a good time.

**eight**  
Metis likes the way Josh laughs when he's out in the sunshine, sometimes when he's tossing around a football with one of his friends or one of his sisters, or sometimes just for no reason at all. He doesn't really like the knowing look the twins sometime give them, but there's not much he can do about it at this point. Muttering about their creepy twin telepathy powers doesn't count, though it does result in him waking up with writing all over his face and his cell phone missing. And the door to Josh's room was _locked_.

**nine**  
Metis likes the cold lemonade his mom makes for them when he and Josh get home from hanging out at the park. It's pretty much the only completely homemade thing his mother makes, aside from the cake on his birthday, and it's actually really quite good. The fact that Metis and Josh have taken to dumping it on people's heads from the top floor of the mall is neither here nor there. Metis refuses to waste precious milkshakes on such trivial matters, so they have no other choice, really. It's the mall's own damn fault that they let people up onto the roof, anyway.

**ten**  
Metis likes staying over at Josh's house when his parents are out of town, because when he wakes up in the morning he's curled up next to Josh, feeling warm and safe and fuck, has he been reading his mom's romance novels in his sleep or something? And it's not like he'd ever want to cuddle when his brain is in working order, of course. He can't help what he does while asleep, right? It's not _his_ fault his subconscious is wonky.

**eleven**  
Mostly, though, Metis just really loves not having random students in the hallways gawk when he and Josh hold hands. It's _creepy_, dammit.


End file.
